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Wayland Made More Inroads In 2017

12-29-2017, 08:30 AM

Phoronix: Wayland Made More Inroads In 2017

Wayland had a very successful year with Ubuntu 17.10 now using it by default, more niche/hobbyist Wayland compositors making progress, KDE Plasma on Wayland becoming more usable for day-to-day use, more applications/libraries natively supporting Wayland, GTK4's Vulkan renderer becoming very usable, and other advancements...

I'm now using Wayland by default (Fedora 27). I previously stuck to Xorg because I have need to record my desktop sometimes and the only option that I could get to work for my use case was ffmpeg which was dependent on Xorg. But that used too much CPU so I purchased a hardware-based solution for recording, so my need for Xorg diminshed.

I now can't use X2Go which is a bummer, but I can live without that.

XWayland has crashed on me a number of times and kicked me to gdm, I think that's to do with having Firefox open, so I've installed Gnome Web (Epiphany). That's perfectly fine for my requirements on Linux.

So have had to make small concessions to be able to use it. I'm going to see how that goes, the big test for me is whether Steam is stable under Wayland. I've got some time off soon when I plan to do some Linux gaming so I shall see.

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So have had to make small concessions to be able to use it. I'm going to see how that goes, the big test for me is whether Steam is stable under Wayland. I've got some time off soon when I plan to do some Linux gaming so I shall see.

For my part, I had some stability problems early on – the Shotwell photo manager had a way of crashing Gnome Shell, which didn't occur on X11, and I was briefly hitting some rendering problems with anything which used WebKitGTK (again, only on Wayland). But both those bugs were fixed long ago now, so I've not tried running X11 for a good six months or more.

As to Steam, it works fine on Wayland for me, and always has. I don't play any particularly GPU-intensive games and so can't comment on whether there's any performance difference, but I've certainly not noticed any problems.

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I can only manage via a hack to make gedit or synaptic work for the remainder of the session, and the hack breaks amdgpu into framebuffer and leads to rendering issues.

Plus Synapse doesn't work properly at startup (you can specify the display but then it starts on screen and not in the background as it should).

I had to fall back to Xorg, which means this can't be properly used yet by an inexperienced Linux user.

That's fair enough, there are clearly use cases where Wayland just isn't there yet. And I get the sentiment that if you can do stuff in Xorg but you can't in Wayland so why would you use Wayland? That's a common argument and I have sympathy with it.

But I think it's important to remember that they're really trying to make the Linux desktop better, and they're closing in on feature parity with Xorg. Yes, it's taken a very long time, but it's getting there to the point where Ubuntu and Fedora deem it appropriate to default to Wayland now. I think a lot of the reasons Xorg 'just works' is because it has no security in a lot of places. People often point to seemingly easy stuff that Wayland can't do like colour pickers and say 'Wayland is terrible because it can't do a simple thing like that', but the reason that that is easy on Xorg is because every window has unfettered access to every other window, and that's BAD. Unfortunately it's trivial to write things like keyloggers in Xorg sessions for this reason.

This causes teething issues for Wayland, it's probably something similar with your issues, and I don't blame you for going back to Xorg. But the distance between Xorg and Wayland is closing all the time and I think we're maybe a year or two away from Xorg being considered legacy and Wayland is the first class citizen of the Linux desktop. And then we'll have the best of both worlds, all the features of the past, with the benefits of Wayland, better security, lower resource usage, a codebase that isn't a monolithic mess that few understand etc.

My only worry is the holdouts that aren't migrating or who are having trouble migrating like XFCE or Firefox.